What Is the Average Cost to Hire a Social Media Manager?

Social media managers driving promotional campaigns to woo online audiences to your brand can be costly to hire. 

On average, their hiring costs will range from $500 to $5000 per month in 2024. This is because they possess an array of analytical and critical skills needed to strategically plan, implement, and steer your social media campaigns to accomplish your brand’s goals. 

The hiring price depends on your social media targets, scale, and type of employment (freelancer, full-time employee, or agency). Nevertheless, there are ways to optimize your budget without compromising on quality.

Your brand’s online presence can be capably enhanced by a skilled social media manager. The return on your investment in a talented manager can yield rich dividends. An astute social media manager is like a catalyst for business growth. They make the most of trendy ads on platforms like Facebook, where 50% of consumers are likely to discover new products. What is even more impressive is a whopping 58% CTR.

So, buckle up as we dive into the details of hiring a social media manager and discover ways to minimize the costs involved while making every penny count. 

Why Do You Need a Social Media Manager?

The necessity of a social media manager cannot be emphasized enough in the age of the Internet. Whether you are running a bustling small enterprise or steering a large corporation with a global footprint, the demands of social media are both relentless and intricate.

As a small business owner, you might find yourself strapped for time. To keep up with the deluge of messages across various social media channels. On the flip side, if you are a large business with a global presence, the need to effectively manage diverse accounts becomes paramount. Whatever the scenario, a social media manager is a valuable asset for any business.

Having a skilled social media manager on your team can help your business grow a great deal by attracting interested and loyal target audiences.

Social media managers are the vital link between your business and its outward expression, delivering a message that seamlessly aligns with your brand’s distinctive image and overarching vision.

What Do Social Media Managers Do?

Social media managers chisel out your brand’s positive image and fortify your brand’s presence on various social platforms that are frequented by almost 5 billion users every day. 

In a nutshell, they perform an array of jobs that give your brand a competitive advantage over adversaries for targeted niche segments.

The prominent activities carried out by social media managers include

• Conceptualizing and developing a strategic roadmap to expand your brand’s online presence.
• Devising unique promotional strategies and customizing them for different platforms.
• Creating and posting compelling, witty, and relevant content that can grab attention.
• Collaborating with media designers to develop immersive visuals, captions, and multimedia that can showcase your brand’s personality in the right light.
• Scheduling the time and frequency of social media posts after analyzing the opportune time for making posts to capture optimum attention.
• Retweet your social media followers’ comments and messages to keep them in good humor and trigger viral conversations around trending topics.
• Building a vibrant community of social followers and addressing the issues plaguing their experience with your brand.
• Managing paid social media campaigns to widen your brand’s outreach.
• Using relevant keywords, hashtags, and handles to keep your brand’s voice trending.
• Driving revenue growth for your brand by presenting your brand with a consistent tone.
• Managing online reputation and warding off malicious attacks on your brand’s image.

How Does Outsourcing a Social Media Manager Work?

Outsourcing a social media manager refers to engaging either a freelance professional or an agency to oversee the social media requirements of your business.

Based on their expertise and the range of services they provide, a social media manager may assume various tasks, including:

• Competitor research
• Devising social media strategies 
• Creating a content calendar 
• Designing posts for all your social channels 
• Managing all your social accounts 
• Analyzing and reporting results, among others.

The process of hiring a suitable social media manager for your business requires you to follow the following steps:

1: Begin researching the best options in your region or based on your business’s specific social media goals.

2: Reach out to the shortlisted agencies and begin interviewing them.

3: Read through their proposal to understand the services they offer and their pricing.

4: Review all the proposals to decide which agency is the right fit for your business’s needs.

How to Get Started and Plan Social Media Management Costs?

Hiring a social media manager perfect for your company is no child’s play. That’s why we have done the brainstorming and have it all broken down for you.

You must determine your budget and how much you want to allocate to this venture. On average, a comprehensive social media program, including content creation, advertising campaign development, and social media software, costs $12,300.

A business needs to realize that the costs involved may vary depending on various factors. These include the needs of the business, availability of the social media manager, experience level, and geographical location. Other variable factors include the scope of work of the professional and the quality of content expected.

Hence, these variables must be given due consideration when determining the budget to ensure a customized and effective social media strategy for your business.

Choosing the Ideal Candidate for Your Team

Deciding whether you want to hire an employee, a freelancer, or a marketing agency depends solely on the size of your brand, your budget, and your marketing goals.

Let’s break down every approach for your better understanding.

1. Hiring an Employee

Hiring an employee on payroll can have both positive and negative impacts on your business. You can get an experienced employee to handle your accounts, ensuring no lag in communication or trust issues. Using a problem solving test to screen candidates at the first step can help you make sure that the selected candidates have a go-getting and problem solving attitude.

On the other hand, however, there are costs associated with having someone dedicated solely to managing these tasks full-time. While this may bring added value, it could also take away resources from other areas, such as marketing or product development, if not managed correctly.

Glassdoor reports that social media managers may charge different salaries depending on their location. For example, social media managers in New York City, NY, USA, make an average of $65k per year, while those in Tulsa, Oklahoma, make an average of $50k.

These variations in salaries are likely influenced by differences in the cost of living between the two cities as well as the availability and quality of talent in each location.

It’s important to note that these salary ranges are just generalizations. Individual salaries may vary based on factors such as a candidate’s experience, education, and specific job responsibilities.

2. Hiring a Freelancer

Hiring a freelancer may work out best for your business if you do not need long-term management. However, a potential drawback of hiring freelancers is that their social media management role may only be a side hustle. This could lead to them not diving deep into your brand image and producing creative content as you might want them to.

On average, freelance social media managers may charge between $10 and $100. That’s anywhere from $4000-$7000 per month. One potential disadvantage of hiring a freelancer is that they typically work independently rather than as part of a larger team.

Fiverr, a global online marketplace, is a great option if freelancer services suit you the best. You can find the right social media manager for you to achieve your business-specific or even platform-specific goals.

3. Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency

However, it is important to understand that you may have to shell out some indirect costs before the ball gets rolling. These include:

• One-off onboarding fees of $300 or more will introduce you to a social media management account and train your staff.
• Paid post-promotion fees of $50–$100 every day if bespoke paid campaigns have to be deployed on different platforms.
• Fees are negotiable for offering personalized, prompter, and direct support to premium customers and covering areas that are not present in the standard package.
• Extra social channel fee, typically $150 per month, for targeting those platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. that are not covered in the standard service level agreement.
• Fees, one-time or long-term, for hiring the services of an influencer who shall endorse your brand for different posts by the social media manager. 

4. Using Digital Marketing Software

Using social media management software can cut down on the work and time it takes to curate content for social media while still delivering quality and creativity.

Most social media management software uses AI to create quality content while using brand language, analyzing current trends, and providing insight-driven strategies.

Prices of such tools range from $0 (free plans) to $1000+, depending on your custom needs.

For example, Predis.ai offers a free plan and paid plans ranging from $25 to $126 per month.

With Predis.ai, you can generate entire social media posts, including creatives, carousels, videos, captions, and hashtags, with the help of AI.

Determining The Scope of Work

Clearly explain the role and work that you want your social media manager to undertake.

This will help you plan out the budget range you want to dedicate to social media management so that you can look for social media managers within that range.

1. Content Creation

Simple content creation may cost less when in the hands of single employees or freelancers. This may vary across the platforms you use and the number of posts you make. TikTok, followed by Facebook, costs the lowest, ranging from $100 to $175 per post, while video content platforms like YouTube and Instagram may cost anywhere from $100 to $500 per post, reel, story, or video, and rightly so.

According to The Washington Post, an average American viewer watches TikTok for 80 minutes a day – more than the time spent on Facebook and Instagram combined. This makes video production an important trend in social media marketing

2. Advertising on Social Media

Advertising on social media is a great way to reach potential customers and build brand recognition. It can be an effective, affordable tool for businesses of any size.

The cost of advertising on social media varies greatly depending on what type of campaign you want to run and which platform you use for your ad campaigns.

On average, most companies spend anywhere from$4000 to $7000 on their campaigns; however, this number can vary significantly based on budget constraints as well as desired outcomes from each campaign effort put forth by the company’s or organization’s marketing team or the agency partner they have hired.

Having an expert in place who understands all aspects of running successful ad campaigns across multiple platforms will help ensure that your business gets maximum value out of its investment in these initiatives.

3. Management of Platforms

The prices for platform management will vary according to the number of profiles and platforms a social media manager or agency handles. The average cost to hire a social media manager for this would be between $100-$4000 per month.

Furthermore, engagement through messaging and mentions, which need prompt responses, the size of your online community, and the features you use will also influence the price.

Social media management platforms are incredibly important for businesses and organizations. They allow you to manage your social media presence easily. You can also create content tailored to your target audience, track engagement metrics, and measure the success of campaigns. With these tools in place, it’s easier to build a solid online presence and reach new customers or followers. Taking advantage of these platforms can help you stay ahead of the competition. It will ensure your message is heard loud and clear by those who matter most!

4. Customer Retention and Community-Building

Your social media manager is responsible for retaining customers and building a vibrant community of social media followers. He or she can work independently or in collaboration with others on your in-house team.

The nature of the job can be exciting and can range from replying to followers’ direct messages to posting satisfactory responses to complaints lodged by visitors on your brand’s social media pages to organizing online events with rewards for loyal page visitors.

The managers who perform the aforementioned jobs often charge between $40 and $190 per hour. This can go up to $320 per hour if you hire managers from a renowned agency.

How to Minimize Social Media Management Costs?

If there’s one thing that’s evident at this point, it’s that social media marketing doesn’t come cheap. It requires allocating anywhere from $500-$15,000 depending on the scope of work. You might be wondering if there are certain ways to reduce these costs, and the answer is yes. Let us spell it out for you.

• Data Analysis to Ensure Cost Efficiency- You can start analyzing the data accrued from your social media ads. This can help you identify trends, interests, and signals in your buyer persona. It can also help save time on market research. However, doing so requires a dedicated social media manager, and depending on the scope of data to sift through, hiring one could be expensive. 
• A Bird in Hand Is Worth Two in the Bush- Another solution is to focus on retaining your existing customers rather than continuously focusing on generating new leads. This is because the process of acquiring a single new customer is a lot more expensive than focusing on engaging your existing customer base. 
• Rely On User-generated Content- A third potential solution is to rely on user-generated content. Statistics show that 84% of customers trust user-generated content or peer recommendations over a brand’s own means of advertising. It highlights the importance of encouraging your customers to create and share content related to your products or services.

Conclusion

A good social media manager can bring about a visible surge in your brand’s online reputation, follower engagement, customer conversion, and revenue generation. To ensure that you get the best hiring deal and the most seasoned professional to steer your social media campaigns, research thoroughly, assess your needs, and screen your candidates. Hire a professional who resonates with your brand’s values and is a perfect match for the company. 

However, there’s no denying that hiring a social media manager or an agency can be expensive, especially for a bootstrapped business or a startup. This is where Predis.AI can come in handy, as it offers you a complete suite of tools to help you streamline your social media operations.

From creating branded content, collaborating with teammates, and creating social media content across various formats to generating creatives and performing competitor analyses, this tool is the perfect combination of ChatGPT, Canva, and HootSuite. 

Check out their free trial, which allows you to generate 30 posts for free!